Judson Carmichael - The Scared Stiff

I reached the kitchen and looked in, and Luz was there, looking at me. She was seated facing me at a large heavy mahogany table, a paperback photo novel open in front of her, along with a beer bottle and a plate containing half a thick sandwich. She gave me a very loose smile, with mischief twinkling in those large dark eyes, and said, “How you doin’, Ernesto?”

I knew enough now to pretend I hadn’t heard her, but that I would realize she’d spoken because I’d seen her lips move. So I smiled and nodded and waved my hand at her, and continued on along the hall, thinking, Damn it, what’s she doing here?

Can it be she wants to check me out anyway, that the thought of syphilis — cured, after all — is becoming less of a deterrent? I don’t need this, I really don’t. I don’t need Luz hanging around, and I don’t need Lola hearing that Luz is hanging around.

I was closing the door of my pitch-black room when what she’d said floated through my brain again: “How you doin’, Ernesto?”

In English.

I woke up late; ten-forty by the Rolex, which I still had. I’d thought long and hard about whether to accessorize Mr. X with my watch and wedding ring, in addition to my wallet, and finally decided there was too much likelihood they’d be lost in the crash. So the heck with it; they were lost in the crash. I’d keep them both with me, but hidden, until I could get back to the States as Felicio, when they would be given to me, as part of her dead husband’s remaining effects, by my grateful sister, Lola.

This was the very tricky part now, when I was floating among identities. I couldn’t very well claim to be Lola’s brother in front of her family, most of whom weren’t in on the scam, so that’s why I was having to be Ernesto Lopez, the pitiful but no longer scabrous deaf mute, until the time was right to leave the country. I was hoping it would only be a week or two.

The idea was, Barry Lee would be buried on Monday, after a very touching funeral mass in the same church in which he’d been married only fourteen years ago, and on Tuesday Lola would fly to New York, carrying with her the death certificate and the funeral card and videotape of the funeral and a copy of the order for the gravestone and Señor Ortiz’s undertaker bill and the deed for the grave plot, and turn all that over to our insurance agent. Then she’d go out and buy a lot of black.

How I’d love to fly north with her, but of course I couldn’t. Or, that is, her brother Felicio couldn’t, since he didn’t at this point have a passport. Soon he would apply for one — with, as usual, the invaluable assistance of his brother Arturo — but we didn’t think it would be safe for Felicio to make any official move until after the insurance company, having decided there was no problem, had paid off. Then, once Lola had that check in hand, Felicio would leave the land of his birth for the very first time just as quickly as he could, to fly north to comfort his widowed sister in her hour of travail.

The death certificate was the key to all this, and one of the reasons we’d decided to work this scam in Guerrera instead of at home is that, in Guerrera, the coronor doesn’t actually have to see the body to give you a death certificate, just so he has a signed statement from a mortician. The reason is that there’s only one coroner for the whole country, but there are morticians everywhere there’s a graveyard. So Señor Ortiz would drive his statement to San Cristobal on Monday, come back with the certificate, and Lola would catch her plane north on Tuesday.

That was the plan, and for the next part of it my job was to do nothing. Not that I had to stay in this tiny room all my life. Seen by the light of day, it really was very small and plain; the word monastic comes to mind, and not only because of the huge mahogany crucifix hanging above the bed. The bars on both windows also helped.

The furniture, apart from this fairly comfortable single bed, consisted of a very crude clunky small dresser, which looked as though it had been made by a Shaker on speed, and a bulky uncomfortable mahogany armless chair built by the same person during rehab.

Well, it was a small room, and it was very late, and yet I was reluctant to get up and start my day, and the reason for that was Luz. She’d spoken to me in English last night. She didn’t buy Arturo’s story, masterful though it had been. She believed something else, but what?

She believed I could hear, and she believed I spoke English.

So Luz was a problem, though I didn’t know yet what problem she was. But it was a problem that would have to be dealt with.

Finally, though, it wasn’t the need to deal with Luz that got me out of bed and into the white terry-cloth robe draped over the chair. It was my bladder. I needed a bathroom.

When I opened the door, the hall was empty and the house silent. I stepped out and saw an open door on my right, before the kitchen, and when I looked in I saw it was a bathroom. It was very modern, with a stall shower and a stack of thick white towels on an attractively graceful small white-painted wooden table completely unlike the usual cumbersome mahogany creations with which so much of Guerrera is littered.

The medicine chest was stocked with unwrapped toothbrushes and combs and disposable razors and all the usual accessories. I could shave!

So this was the guest area of the house, and this was the guest bathroom, and it was not at all what I would have expected from Cousin Carlos, but I was grateful. And that shower looked very tempting.

And refreshing. When I went back into the guest room fifteen minutes later, I felt much more positive about life. I was clean and rested. My face was tingling with aftershave rather than itching with stubble, and in the bathroom mirror I had seen a man with a definite mustache: not nearly as luxurious as his driver’s license photo yet, but showing promise.

Now that I felt physically better, I felt better about everything else, including Luz. She was family, after all. She might be a provocateur, but there was no reason for her to make real trouble.

Next to the dresser in my guest room, on the floor, stood the ratty little cardboard suitcase Arturo had brought up to Rancio earlier, containing Ernesto/Felicio’s few shabby possessions. I emptied it now into the dresser, putting some of the clothing on my fresh new body along the way, and then I went out at last to see what the day had to offer.

This morning, in the kitchen, it did not offer Luz but rather the woman servant who’d fed us all lunch outside last time I was here. She was slicing plantains when I walked in, but she turned around at once, smiled at me, dried her hands on her apron, and gestured for me to sit at the table. (I obviously couldn’t be the deaf mute with this woman, not and live here, so Carlos had told her she should be the deaf mute outside this house, in re me.)

I nodded my thanks, took the same chair as Luz had used, and the woman started bringing me things: a tall glass of fresh orange juice, a huge colorful mug of strong black coffee, and, when I made pouring gestures, a tan earthenware jug of warm milk to pour in with it.

And more: Three eggs, sunny side up. More coffee. Then half a melon the color of gold accompanied by half a lime the color of cash.

I could get to like it here.

After breakfast, feeling better, I went from the kitchen to the patio, planning to sit quietly in the shade and watch the lazy river while I slowly digested. There were a few white chaise longues over by the pool, under the extensive blue-and-white awning; I started in that direction and then stopped when I realized I wasn’t alone.